DATA ENGINEER

Sample Case Study: MJTelco

This is a sample case study that may be used on the Google Data Engineer Certification exam. It describes a fictitious business and solution concept to provide additional context to exam questions.

MJTelco Case Study

Company Overview

MJTelco is a startup that plans to build networks in rapidly growing,
underserved markets around the world. The company has patents for innovative
optical communications hardware. Based on these patents, they can create many
reliable, high-speed backbone links with inexpensive hardware.

Company Background

Founded by experienced telecom executives, MJTelco uses technologies originally
developed to overcome communications challenges in space. Fundamental to their
operation, they need to create a distributed data infrastructure that drives
real-time analysis and incorporates machine learning to continuously optimize their
topologies. Because their hardware is inexpensive, they plan to overdeploy the
network allowing them to account for the impact of dynamic regional politics on
location availability and cost.

Their management and operations teams are situated all around the globe creating
many-to-many relationship between data consumers and providers in their system.
After careful consideration, they decided public cloud is the perfect environment
to support their needs.

Solution Concept

MJTelco is running a successful proof-of-concept (PoC) project in its labs. They have two primary needs:

Scale and harden their PoC to support significantly more data flows generated
when they ramp to more than 50,000 installations.

Refine their machine-learning cycles to verify and improve the dynamic models
they use to control topology definitions.

MJTelco will also use three separate operating environments -- development/test,
staging, and production -- to meet the needs of running experiments, deploying new
features, and serving production customers.

Business Requirements

Scale up their production environment with minimal cost, instantiating resources
when and where needed in an unpredictable, distributed telecom user community.

Ensure security of their proprietary data to protect their leading-edge
machine learning and analysis.

Provide reliable and timely access to data for analysis from distributed research workers.

Maintain isolated environments that support rapid iteration of their
machine-learning models without affecting their customers.

Technical Requirements

Ensure secure and efficient transport and storage of telemetry data.

Rapidly scale instances to support between 10,000 and 100,000 data providers
with multiple flows each.

Allow analysis and presentation against data tables tracking up to 2 years of
data storing approximately 100m records/day.

Support rapid iteration of monitoring infrastructure focused on awareness of
data pipeline problems both in telemetry flows and in production learning cycles.

CEO Statement

Our business model relies on our patents, analytics and dynamic machine learning.
Our inexpensive hardware is organized to be highly reliable, which gives us cost
advantages. We need to quickly stabilize our large distributed data pipelines to
meet our reliability and capacity commitments.

CTO Statement

Our public cloud services must operate as advertised. We need resources that scale
and keep our data secure. We also need environments in which our data scientists
can carefully study and quickly adapt our models. Because we rely on automation to
process our data, we also need our development and test environments to work as we
iterate.

CFO Statement

This project is too large for us to maintain the hardware and software required
for the data and analysis. Also, we cannot afford to staff an operations team to
monitor so many data feeds, so we will rely on automation and infrastructure.
Google Cloud’s machine learning will allow our quantitative researchers to work on
our high-value problems instead of problems with our data pipelines.